


The Divine Fool

by zuotian



Category: South Park
Genre: Angst, Bathing/Washing, Death, Established Relationship, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Hospitals, Human Sacrifice, M/M, Murder, Pyromania, Sex, Sharing a Body, Soul Bond, The Biggest Douche in the Universe references, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-12 17:02:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15344409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuotian/pseuds/zuotian
Summary: Kenny was nearly burned alive the day of his mother's funeral. Cartman  stopped at nothing to bring Kenny back from his resulting coma, even if it meant digging up the dead.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS FANFICTION—EVEN THOSE BASED ON A REAL SHOW—ARE ENTIRELY GRATUITOUS. ALL CANONICAL DIALOGUE IS IMPERSONATED ... POORLY. THE FOLLOWING FANFICTION CONTAINS COARSE LANGUAGE AND DUE TO ITS CONTENT IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE.

The day was overcast, bleak, and wet—fitting for Mrs. McCormick’s funeral, most thought. She was buried next to Stuart, the both of them finally together in rest if not peace.

Their second oldest child but youngest son stood between his brother and sister in front of their parents’ tombstones. Not many stood behind them, and those present were mostly there for Kenny anyway, but Karen had a few friends from college, and even Kevin’s latest girlfriend stood mildly sympathetic, largely bored.

At the news of his mother’s death Kenny had been shouldered the task of decision-making, with Kevin’s apathy and Karen so young. This was nothing new, even when their parents were both alive. There was no priest. Kenny wanted things simple, short, and sweet. He wanted to shovel dirt onto his mother’s casket as quickly as possible. She’d been a blight and light in his life, and he was glad to finally shove her out of mind.

The visitation eulogy was a blur in Kenny’s memory. “She wasn’t the best,” he’d said, “but she wasn’t the worst. And we loved her for it. Amen.” The last bit had been sardonic but a little sincere too.

He hopped off the podium and sat back down next to his brother and sister with shaking hands. The undertakers belatedly started a morose instrumental track as people queued up to see Mrs. McCormick’s casket.

After handshakes and extended loitering around the dead person, everybody got up and left. Kenny thought it was neat to ride behind the hearse and lead the uninterrupted procession line, a flag plopped onto the hood of the pickup which had been passed down from Stuart to Kevin to Kenny.

It started raining lightly at the cemetery while everyone stepped out onto the grass. The funeral home had set up a tent ahead of time, and the meager gathering stood beneath its pit-pattering roof in silence while the three McCormick kids buried their mother.

When they were finished, Kenny had callouses on his palms and dirt on his nice loafers. Karen laid flowers before their mom and dad’s tombstones. The daisies were fake, plastic, soaking up the rain. Karen bought them at the dollar store when Kenny emphatically insisted real flowers were too fucking expensive. He felt bad about it for his sister’s sake, but at least this way the fakes could stay forever. No one would ever have to come back and replace them.

People dispersed quickly. Karen went to her friend’s house. Kevin left with his girlfriend. Eventually Kenny stood alone in front of the two graves as it continued to rain.

Three figures milled about in suits behind him, underneath the tent.

“We can’t just leave him,” Kyle said. His jewfro bobbed while he shifted from foot to foot; the moisture in the air had turned his curls into a giant mass of frizz.

“Maybe we could get food,” Stan halfheartedly suggested.

“I doubt he’s got an appetite right now, moron,” Cartman chastised. “Jesus Christ.”

Stan scoffed, pivoting in his loafers as if to shoulder check Cartman, but they were adults now and this was a funeral. “It was just an idea, asshole.”

“A stupid idea,” Cartman clarified. He unbuttoned his jacket and pulled a pack of cigarettes from a silk-lined pocket.

“You’re seriously lighting one up right now?” Kyle asked, glancing at Kenny’s back.

“What?” Cartman asked around the cigarette in his mouth. He flicked the wheel of his lighter and let out a long, suffering exhale before even re-pocketing the pack. He gestured to the new tombstone with his cigarette. “I’m sure she’s chainsmoking with Satan right now.”

“How long are we gonna let him stand there?” Stan asked, redirecting the conversation.

“Long as he needs to,” Cartman said. “Full offense, but I think you two are out of jurisdiction.”

“What?” Kyle narrowed his eyes. “What does that mean?”

“Look, Sheila, you can’t just mother hen this right now.”

“Oh come off it,” Stan snapped.

“And you’re as clueless as Randy,” Cartman added, ashing his cigarette and lobbing the names of the living like they were accusations. “Have either your parents died yet?”

“No,” Stan said.

“Well?”

Kyle crossed his arms. His forehead creased with annoyance, but his eyes softened as he looked away. “No.”

“Then fuck out our club,” Cartman said with an aggressive shooing motion.

Kyle reared back, incensed. “So you’re going to babysit Kenny while he mourns, huh?”

“He doesn’t need babysat. Would you relax? You don’t think I can keep an eye on him?”

“No, I don’t think you’re capable of any kinda emotional support, fatass.”

Cartman blew smoke right into Kyle’s Jewish asthmatic face. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Kyle dramatically swat the cloud away. Stan caught his wrist before he started slapping Cartman too or something. “Let’s just go, dude.”

Kyle dropped it and sighed. “Well let’s at least say bye,” he said, looking back at Kenny again.

“Hey—” Cartman swung around, broadening his shoulders to their widest point. “I thought I told you to fuck off, like five minutes ago!”

Cartman persisted Kyle’s silent stand-off for a good minute before the soul-sucking ginger backed off, but Kyle knew all along the posturing was just Cartman’s weird protective intricacy, anyway.

“We’ll meet up with you guys later, alright?” Kyle said, and jabbed a finger against Cartman’s lapel, right over the silk-lined pocket holding the cigarettes. “And I don’t wanna see Kenny shmoozed drunk at Skeeter’s!”

“That’s exactly how you’re gonna find him,” Cartman sneered.

“You’re such a bastard,” Kyle huffed, and started walking away.

Stan held back a few steps. “Don’t take it personal,” he said to Cartman.

“I’ve never taken Kyle serious, let alone personal.”

“But you really aren’t gonna let Kenny get smashed, are you?” Stan asked, with all his generational alcoholism senses tingling.

“The night is still young. You guys just aren’t in the club.”

“Not yet,” Stan said with his pensive emo face, and looked around at the rows of stones marking the dead.

“My mom was soul-less,” Cartman said, and stopped, forcing Stan to look up and asses the gravity of his next words. “She was the biggest cunt of them all, but I miss being able to hate her. It was so sweet while it lasted.”

“You really are a bastard,” Stan said, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

“I’m just saying. I never really unloaded it on Liane, and I wish I had. Every night I pray to Satan he’ll send her a letter of all the reasons, and in Heaven when I die I’ll drink her sweet tears.”

“Whatever, have fun counseling Kenny.” Lassoed by rope tied around the stick up Kyle’s ass, Stan was physically tugged in the opposite direction with a couple bumbling steps. “We’ll come by later, for the fallout.”

“Okay,” Cartman said and puffed his cigarette. Then he flicked it into the rain and smashed it out.

Stan vacated the premises back to the parking lot where Kyle was impatiently waiting. Cartman watched his retreating back in amusement.

“Thought they were never gonna leave,” Kenny said without turning around. He was still a few feet away and it was raining, but he didn’t raise his voice any higher. People said he was quiet, but you just had to know how to listen.

Cartman knew to listen. He canted his baritone over the rain. “Those two are just fags, and fags think with their feelings. They mean well, you know.”

Kenny didn’t respond, just shuffled his feet a little. His suit was soaked, clinging to his short wiry frame in sodden folds. His blond hair plastered in dark curls down the nape of his neck behind his exposed ears, where rows of piercings glinted several shades of silver. They were about thirty and Kenny couldn’t walk through airline security; not that he’d ever afford a ticket, but still it was funny.

“Come over and smoke a cigarette or something, you’re making me nervous.”

Kenny abruptly spun on his heel and ducked back under the tent. Like any response short of instantaneous wouldn’t pass Cartman’s provocation.

“Get me a cigarette then,” Kenny said.

“Shit, you’re a fucking weasel,” Cartman said.

Kenny was already molesting him anyway, pawing into his jacket where Kyle’s grubby finger—the same finger he stuck up Stan’s asshole probably—had crumpled the carton of cigarettes. Kenny retrieved the dented hard pack and tapped its bottom against his palm a couple times.

“Got a light?”

“Yeah, for under your ass,” Cartman muttered, clicking his Bic aflame under Kenny’s crooked nose.

Kenny inhaled the light as the cigarette burnt ember, then leaned his head back. He didn’t bring up his hands at all as he exhaled and spoke a second—he could shove the cigarette between his front teeth with his tongue and jaw. It gave him a lisp but it was also cool as hell. “So what’s the plan? Kyle says you’re babysitting? Can we order pizza and you steal my virginity?”

“Is your idiot siblings gonna be home for awhile?” Cartman asked.

“I don’t know,” Kenny shrugged. “I don’t want to be home.”

“We could torch it.”

“Arson, fuck yeah.”

“I’m serious, let’s break some shit. After my mom died I took a baseball bat to her whole fucking room.”

“You’re crazy, man,” Kenny said.

“You still got that aluminum bat in your truck?”

“Yeah.”

“Perfect.”

“God, I wanna climb you like a tree,” quipped Kenny all of a sudden. The cigarette was back between his nimble bony fingers—when Cartman didn’t know—he was a ninja.

“It was disgusting,” Cartman said, “you were giving fuck me eyes next to your dead mother.”

“I had to look at somebody,” Kenny said. “Thought I was gonna puke, damn it—I don’t even know what I said—what should I have said?—death makes me horny, man—”

“‘Fuck you, Mom!’” Cartman yelled. “How about that?”

“I’m getting a headache, man, don’t,” Kenny said and shut his eyes.

Cartman barged in a few steps closer. “You wanna go lie down, or something? You wanna trash your mom’s shit?”

“I don’t know, man. What were you saying to Stan about ghosts? Isn’t she gonna haunt me?”

“No, Kenny, she won’t. You won’t let her.”

“Can we go to your house?” Kenny asked.

“What is it, high school? You wanna smoke all my weed and eat my Cheesy Poofs too?”

“Kinda of, yeah, or just sleep.”

“C’mon, princess,” Cartman said, and stole the smoldering cigarette butt from Kenny’s mouth to throw it onto his parents’ graves. “Let’s go home. Your actual home, yeah, since eighth grade?”

Eighth grade—the first winter break Kenny for real ran away, showed up on Cartman’s doorstep because Stan was at a ski resort that year and Kyle was busy with Hanukah jew stuff. Liane was off to see her newest sugar daddy in Miami, and Cartman was just alone as Kenny for the holidays. Kevin was in jail, Karen temporarily in the state’s care—and they hadn’t found Kenny yet, was all.

Cartman was adamant they didn’t because he’d carved out a Kenny-shaped space in his loneliness without knowing it, and because he didn’t want the government one-upping his friend or by extension him.

Since then, Kenny came back for sanctuary depending on the season and reason. They were twice as old now but things hadn’t changed too much.

“Princess?” Kenny said, raising his eyebrows. Of course he would only pay attention to that. “Princess, huh?”

“Oh shut up, you fucking ghetto trash heap—”

“Why don’t ya carry me to the car, if I’m a princess,” Kenny said, and laid himself over Cartman’s side, tucking his head into Cartman’s shoulder like it fit there all along. His ugly hooked nose was cold against Cartman’s soft neck. “I’m in distress.”

Cartman swung Kenny up into his arms bridal style, what the hell—he already surrendered to that admission years ago—what point was there now? “Ain’t no damsel,” he said.

Kenny sighed. “Don’t ruin this for me.”

Cartman trekked it all the way to the parking lot. Nobody was in sight, least of all Kyle or Stan—they’d never let him live it down if they saw him now. Carrying Kenny was the equivalent of carrying a laundry basket. Except laundry baskets don’t nose up into your ear and suck bruises into your jaw.

“Cut it out,” Cartman snapped as Kenny’s ugly pickup came into view.

Kenny chomped down on his earlobe.

“Ey!”

Cartman dropped Kenny onto his ass. Kenny tumbled around the cracked blacktop laughing his head off. When he really laughed he sounded deranged, choking on gulps of air to expel them in high pitched squeals. Like a hyena or coyote on the horizon, you never knew exactly why he laughed but something was always amusing him and you could hear him from miles away.

Cartman touched his ear to make sure he wasn’t bleeding or anything. He wasn’t, but it still hurt. He kicked Kenny’s kidney in retaliation, then hustled him up against the side of the truck.

“Are you drunk?” Cartman asked, holding Kenny’s thin arms in his meaty grip. “Did you have a flask you’re holding out on me?”

Kenny was quieting now, giggling soft. “I’ve been putting out for you forever, dude, come on.”

“I’ll drive,” Cartman said, and shoved his hand into Kenny’s slack pockets to steal his keys.

Kenny gyrated his hips, swinging his dick around to touch Cartman’s hand. Cartman snatched the keyring out and shoved Kenny aside to open the passenger door. The door creaked and moaned, rust dusting the blacktop and Cartman’s shoes.

“Get in,” Cartman ordered.

Kenny complied easily enough. Cartman moved around to the other side. He hadn’t driven Kenny’s truck in awhile. The thin, ribbed steering wheel felt good under his hand. With his other hand he changed gears—it was stick shift—and pulled into reverse.

Once they were on the road, Kenny cranked his window down, then fumbled with the radio dial. Static, static, static—

“Shit, throw a cassette in or something,” Cartman said.

Kenny hummed, bending down between his feet to retrieve the few tapes scattered on the floor.

Willie Nelson’s Stardust album began jingling through the shitty speakers.

“If you’re gonna listen to blues, you might as well listen to black people singing it,” Cartman said.

“I like the harmonica,” said Kenny. He was beating his knuckles against the window in time with the beat, elbow bent on the retro ashtray in the door.

“All of this is literally second grade negro music.” Cartman yanked his arm around the gear shift. It made a terrible yawning screech. “You’re white, angry, emo, right; you like Nirvana? Kurt Cobain said African-Americans invent the only worthwhile music since they sang in the cotton fields.

“Secondly, if you listen to anybody, listen to Johnny Cash. Folsom Prison Blues. Willie sings like a woman.”

Cartman looked at Kenny mid-tirade. Kenny’s head was cocked against the half-down glass now, hand curled loosely under his chin as he kept tapping the beat. Tufts of hair swung out the open window into the wind and rain. Droplets fell down his forehead, closed eyes, and over his pierced lip into a raging 5 o’ clock shadow that faded from his jaw into the collar of his dress shirt.

Willie sang over Kenny’s metronome knuckles with a slow organ melody behind. ‘I'm a little lamb. who's lost in the woods, I know I could, always be good, to one who'll watch o-ver me...’

Cartman let go of the gear shift to hit the stop and eject button. He tossed the tape at Kenny’s shoulder, nearly out the window, and good riddance if he had in fact. “I’m falling asleep from his goddamn lullaby.”

Kenny uncurled into an upward position and put the cassette back in its plastic case. “Are we there yet,” he asked, throwing the tape back onto the floor.

“Yeah, about five minutes, why don’t you wake up?”

A loud crack twisted Kenny’s neck in half and he did the same to all his other crazy double-jointed parts, then looked down at himself. “I need to get out of these goddamn clothes. They’re rented.”

“And walk around naked too?”

“I’ll wear your old clothes.”

“Yeah, trespass my home, smoke my weed, eat my food, wear my shit, and I can cut off my foreskin for when your dick gets cold.”

“You’re uncircumcised, dude.”

“It’s an analogy! Go back to sleep already.”

“We’re here,” said Kenny as they rolled up to Cartman’s same childhood home. He opened the door before Cartman even stopped in the driveway, jumped out and walked to a rock under the left window where a key was hidden—a precaution of Liane’s Cartman couldn’t shake off himself.

Cartman shut off Kenny’s own truck as Kenny walked into Cartman’s own house. The poor rat bastard was probably desperate for warmth and shelter. As Cartman stepped away from the pickup he looked over to the passenger side.

Kenny had left the window half-down and it was still raining all over. Cartman glared into the open front doorway of his home, then walk around to the passenger door. He unlocked it, rolled the window back up, and kind of smeared rainwater off the leather seat when he looked down at the ground to find that a cassette tape fell out when Kenny had opened the door.

Cartman bent down to pick it up. It was womanly Willie. He threw it back into the truck without looking and slammed the door shut.

Inside, Kenny’s shoes were by the front door and his jacket was thrown over the couch. Cartman followed his wet footsteps upstairs to the bathroom—

“Hey.”

Kenny was standing in the hallway against the bathroom door frame while steam from the running shower was pouring out the open door into the hall. Cartman nearly fell down the top stair and had to grab the railing.

“What’s going on,” asked Kenny casually.

“I don’t know, maybe you needed a towel or something!”

“I have one.”

The steam was obscuring Kenny’s naked form now, but it also gave Cartman a thousand more goosebumps under his cold wet clothes. “Then go take a shower, idiot, before you use all the hot water.”

“I told you I was really horny,” Kenny said, and walked up to Cartman and climbed him like a tree. Kenny’s naked dick got smashed between his rib-thin stomach and Cartman’s chest as his legs wrapped around Cartman’s waist.

Cartman fell back against the wall and brought his hands to Kenny’s back, to hold him in place. “Serious?”

Kenny nodded, dropping his legs now but keeping his arms over Cartman’s shoulders. “I mean I gotta get somethin.”

“Just something? Go call a prostitute—mmf!”

Kenny took Cartman by the ears and yanked him down a notch to collide their faces together with their mouths. His lip piercing scraped against Cartman’s teeth. They both still tasted like cigarettes, but Kenny also had a little rum in his breath, Cartman knew it.

“Alcoholic fuck,” Cartman panted in Kenny’s face once he pulled away.

Kenny laughed and began unbuttoning Cartman’s clothes. Cartman let them fall away, like he was a corn cob being husked, let Kenny take him into the bathroom and bring him into the shower. Liane had the shower updated a few years before she died. It was a sex cubicle now with two showerheads and a whole bench to sit on.

Cartman sighed as hot water poured down his back and chased out any remaining cold. Kenny was humping his leg and pumping his dick, each action in tandem with each other.

“Lemme sit down,” Cartman huffed, and dropped his ass onto the tile bench. A shampoo bottle clattered to the ground. Kenny picked it up and put it in Cartman’s hands.

“Wash my hair.”

“Huh?”

Kenny kneeled between Cartman’s legs and started pushing his knees apart.

Cartman squirted shampoo into his hands while Kenny mouthed his dick. It sat above his vulva, a good four and a half inches long on top of Kenny’s tongue, that’s what years of obsessive pumping, testosterone, and a little metoidioplasty got you. It at least excelled the Above Average baseline on the national TMI scale at this point.

Cartman started lathering Kenny’s wet golden retriever hair as Kenny sucked harder, stuck the base of Cartman’s dick between his two front teeth, nibbling a little and getting pubes in his nose and mouth. Cartman yelped and pulled at Kenny’s sudsy hair. It slipped ineffectually between his fingers. He was inspired back to action when Kenny pulled off and dived two fingers into his wet pussy.

Kenny knew how to press his thumb against the base of Cartman’s dick while fingering him, and it left Cartman writhing around on the bench. He squeezed his beard-burnt thighs around Kenny’s hand, while Kenny kept his forehead against Cartman’s knees and Cartman kept running his hands in Kenny’s hair. The water only barely cascaded over them from the bench, but there was enough steam to suffocate.

Cartman willed himself to open his legs after a bit and took Kenny’s shaded jaw in his hands. “Rinse off,” he muttered, tipping Kenny’s head back into the water himself so he could massage the soap out.

When he was done, Cartman dropped his head between his own knees to wash himself.

“I can do it,” Kenny said, hovering at his side.

“You’ll take forever, and I at least want to go to the bed,” Cartman said, already rinsing.

They slapped some body wash on and off then stepped out the sex cubicle. They toweled off walking to Cartman’s bedroom, which was the same as it ever was.

Kenny stretched out deliciously naked across Cartman’s bed, his dick at half-mast against his navel.

“So what now?” Cartman asked, crawling up next to him like they were discussing breakfast.

“Fuck you,” Kenny said.

The only time Cartman didn’t respond to those to words was when Kenny rolled over like a doll on top of him. All Kenny’s skinny double-jointed limbs cushioned by Cartman’s mass—only half of it fat, now—as he readied to slide his dick into Cartman’s vagina.

Kenny dropped his head to Cartman’s chest when he hit home base. “Eric,” he breathed, picking up a well practiced pace.

They could stay like this for hours, watching a movie or nothing at all, only thinking with their dicks as they slammed into each other with ease.

Cartman detached, dropping back against the headboard, letting Kenny do whatever. He met every thrust subconsciously, using his finer trains of thought to contemplate the man before him. He really hadn’t said a damn thing to Cartman all day till this, and it freaked Cartman out. They still had a long night ahead—all this was just working up the juice.

Kenny’s hips stuttered as he came. Cartman was glad of the IUD blocking out the white trash sperm; he was practically a thirty year old hermaphrodite, but still didn’t want any chance of that particular virus taking hold.

“Just leave it for now,” Cartman said as Kenny started scooping cum out of him, but it was all part of the blond’s maintenance routine. Kenny treated sex like an event with prelude and encore. Every time he had to dig out his own goddamn mess with two long fingers, just because he wouldn’t wear condoms.

But it came with another blow job. Cartman felt satisfied once he squirted in Kenny’s mouth. Nobody knew if it was piss or cum and Kenny gobbled it like mystery meat, always starving.

Cartman left to pee out the rest of McCormick’s ejaculate. He returned to the bedroom to find Kenny sprawled out like a star fish, not even taking up the majority of the mattress he was so short and weedy.

Cartman opened his bottom drawer to a collection of mismatched Kenny-approved clothes, and tossed the other man a pair of shorts and t-shirt. Kenny wormed into the outfit and scratched at his balls. He didn’t bother with the cum drying there, after every shower he always had to rebuild the film of filth that layered his skin.

Cartman dressed himself, then pulled a blanket over Kenny. “Take a nap or something.”

Kenny curled into the blanket, one eye open. “Where’re you going?”

“Relax.”

As Kenny slept, Cartman went out and collected all their clothes to take to the drycleaners. Then he took his cigarettes and smoked out the kitchen sliding door. Kenny passed out asleep; this was his post-coital compulsion.

Once that was finished, Cartman went through the garage. The bat he used to ruin his own mother’s stuff had splintered. He found an old tennis racket—couldn’t remember when he played tennis—some gasoline and a box of matches, and threw them into a bag. He’d found Kenny’s flask in the jacket on the couch, and refilled that with his handle of Jack, then with consideration put the entire bottle in the bag too.

He left everything by the front door, went upstairs to check on Kenny who was apparently waiting for him to reenter the room because he was abruptly tackled to the goddamn floor.

Kenny laughed on top of him, wrestling Cartman’s hands down as he tried to resist. “Relax, relax,” he said in parody of Cartman’s own words.

“Cut it out! We gotta go to the drycleaners—”

“Blow me and I’ll go,” Kenny said, already sitting his ass on Cartman’s sternum, “I slept it all off already.”

Kenny always was a sex fiend but he became an addict in times of stress, and Cartman was obliged to enable him for reasons nobody thought about. He propped up on his elbows and opened his mouth—Kenny pulled the borrowed shorts down and shoved his dick in all the way to the uvula.

They’d had at least a decade of practice, though, and Cartman took him like a champ, but spluttered awful when Kenny came and he spat at the blond’s face.

“I don’t fucking swallow,” Cartman bellowed.

“I know,” Kenny said with a grin, his own cum dripping into his beard off his face like some weird baptist penance.

“Don’t be weird,” Cartman grunted, and pushed him off.

Kenny plucked a couple of tissues from the nightstand beside the bed. “Thanks,” he said, wiping his face off.

Cartman paused in standing; he hadn’t heard. “What?”

“Thanks.” Kenny discarded the tissues in the nightstand drawer. “I said thanks.”

Cartman rose up over him, shaken in a way he didn’t understand. “You’re driving now.”

They went to the drycleaners. Kenny bummed another cigarette in the truck while Cartman had to give their suits to the ambiguously Asian people behind the counter. He got back in the passenger side.

“Fucking Chinese ragheads,” Cartman said.

“Relax, fat-boy.”

“Stop saying that.”

“‘Relax or ‘fat-boy?’”

Willie Nelson was playing again.

“Goddamn it. You made that fall out. That was out in the driveway. I picked it up.”

“Thanks, man,” Kenny said.

“Stop thanking me!”

“Why’d you pick it up if you hate it? Going soft?”

“I don’t know, I just had your dick in my mouth, you tell me.”

Kenny’s hand sat on the gear shift, elfish and pale. Cartman covered it with his open fist for five seconds, only to pluck the half-finished cigarette out from between his fingers.

The rain let up. Cartman rolled his window down and exhaled. “You’re welcome,” he said.

Kenny didn’t say anything, tapping the beat out on the steering wheel. Willie crooned, ‘Won't you tell her please, to put on some speed, follow my lead, oh how I need someone to watch o-ver me...’

They pulled over the tracks into gravel and arrived at the McCormick house. Karen and Kevin weren’t parked anywhere in sight.

“Perfect,” Cartman said, popping the door. He retrieved the aluminum bat and his bag of tricks from the trunk. When Kenny didn’t step out, he knocked on the window. Kenny rolled it down. The pickup was off, Willie Nelson was silent. “Come on,” Cartman said.

Kenny followed, shuffling behind as Cartman lead him into his own house. It was silent save the rats in the walls. They went down the hall to Kenny’s parents’ room.

How many times had Kenny heard them yell through this door?

Cartman was staring at him, waiting for him. Kenny sighed and finally twisted the knob.

It smelled like his mom’s perfume. On the dresser an empty bottle of pills laid sideways. Empty needles haloed the bed.

Cartman handed him the bat. “You first.”

Kenny played with the bat’s grip, rotated his wrist around loose. “What should I do?”

“Don’t ask me all of a sudden.”

Kenny swung the bat into a full body mirror. The sheet of glass gave an anti-climatic clack. A few lines spiderwebbed from the point of impact, but it was mostly unimpressive. He swung again and again till a great shatter made the mirror collapse like a falling curtain. Specks of glass struck Kenny all over. His arms bled a little.

Cartman picked up some old glass thing. “What’s this?”

Kenny glanced. “Ashtray from my grandpa, I think,” he said and looked back to appraise his work.

Cartman put the ashtray in his bag. He emptied out the drawers, took Mrs. McCormick’s clothes and brassieres. He put all the needles together in a pillowcase and tied them off.

Kenny broke up all the furniture into firewood with the aluminum bat as Cartman emptied their contents. The mirror, the dresser, the nightstand were all beaten up. Kenny’s skin was red head-to-foot by the end, and sweat instead of rain streaked down his face in rivulets. His arms stopped bleeding, but random splinters and cuts also adorned his skin.

They moved everything into the trunk of the truck. Kenny thought one of his mom’s needles stabbed him because he felt hopped up flying down the backroads to the abandoned lots out this side of town. Cartman was absolutely holding his hand over the gear shift, for life and to track their movements while the pickup jerked over loose gravel and potholes.

“Slow down, for Christ’s sake!”

Kenny floored the accelerator. The speedometer ticked over eighty, ninety. They crested a small hill and caught minimal air, jamming down to the ground with a clatter.

“Slow down, slow down—Jesus Christ!”

Kenny yanked the wheel into a hard left. The right side of the truck scraped against a guard rail as he drove past the overpass, its quarry, and down a side road into a grassy lot ringed by trees on three sides expect for north, where a flat bluff jutted over another drop in the quarry.

He parked unceremoniously and encouraged Cartman’s hand to uncurl around his own. “We made it.”

“I’m gonna puke.” Cartman opened his door and stumbled out.

“I thought you were in NASCAR.”

“I was—” Cartman coughed and spat into the tall grass. “It’s probably your sewer cum in my stomach, you forced me to swallow—”

“I couldn’t force you to do anything.”

Cartman ignored that statement to retrieve his bag. He pulled out the gasoline and matches, then dumped the rest in the grass. Kenny watched him unload all the furniture in a big pile, head on the steering wheel. He was a big guy. He wasn’t winded at all except for exasperation when he stood at Kenny’s window.

“Ready, princess?”

Kenny rolled his head around to face Cartman and shrugged. “Well, there's no going back anymore.”

Cartman opened the door for him. Kenny felt like Cinderella at the ball. He grabbed the jug of gasoline and poured its entire contents, then lit a match.

He held Cartman’s hand as the fire caught. It was slow at first, crackling and popping in small orange flames. Then they all raced to the top and grew into a giant red wave. The heat blew into Kenny’s hair, made him step back into Cartman’s sentinel chest.

The pickup’s engine still chugged. Kenny hadn’t turned it off. Willie Nelson sung out into the fire.

“Pretty romantic, huh?” Kenny asked, twisting around to look up at Cartman’s face. “I love you.”

Cartman blinked down at him.

Kenny kissed him before he could respond. The fire surged at his back, so the fire surged inside of him too. He stood on his tip-toes, barefoot because he wouldn’t wear his loafers anymore. He pulled Cartman down, took a step back to steady them both—his naked Achilles heel was licked by an errant flame—

“What—” Cartman stumbled forward at Kenny’s shout of pain, worsening their balance, forcing Kenny back further.

Kenny pushed Cartman away, fighting grappling hands as the fire jumped onto his shorts. The momentum in his arms sent his feet tumbling. His shirt was on fire now too, he felt his eyelashes and eyebrows singe—

“Eric,” he gasped, falling down into the fire. Wood broke easy underneath him, crumpled into a bed of embers. Then he started screaming.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little shorter but i decided to end it here and add a third part as an epilogue of sorts

With the drycleaned suits hanging up behind him in the backseat, Cartman sat in his two-door red sedan and listened to three Johnny Cash songs before he opened his glove compartment and pulled out an unassuming baggie. The weight of the world sat in his hands, but it weighed a feather.

‘You've got a way to keep me on your side, you give me cause for love that I can't hide, for you I know I'd even try to turn the tide—because you're mine, I walk the line.’

“God damn it, Johnny Cash,” Cartman swore. He dropped the baggie onto his lap and covered his face with his hands, an automatic motion which made him realize he’d been crying before he knew it.

After pulling Kenny out of the fire and smacking the flames out with his own hands and clothes, Cartman carried the blond into the truck and started driving with his burnt palms and fingers blistering in their grip on the steering wheel and gear shift. He burst through Hell Pass’ doors in half a shirt and torn pants, yelling about the burn victim unit.

It happened in slow motion, somebody taking Kenny away and putting him onto a stretcher. A nurse forced Cartman into a small room to look at his hands, and what were all these glass lacerations and splinters about—

Who were they supposed to call? Cartman spouted off Kyle’s number, because Kyle would know Karen’s number and she would get her idiot brother, and they would all come down and know Cartman killed Kenny.

“You know,” Stan had said once they’d all shown up, after Cartman had to report to receptionist Bebe Stevens about the situation, “you really, really are a bastard.”

“You set him on fire!”

Kyle had been shrieking since he walked into the building, Cartman bet. You could hear him the second he stepped off the elevator to the critical care unit, and when he saw Cartman, who was tattered and half-burnt himself, he let out a raucous yell that should’ve woken Kenny out of his coma. Even as Stan was talking, he’d kept on shrieking things, and now he was pushing into Cartman’s space again and repeated, “You—set—Kenny—on—fire!”

Cartman didn’t even mention it was a mistake, he knew it was useless. “If you wanna come beat me up, fine, Broflovski, but at least let’s go out to the parking lot so I can allow you a decent swing—”

“Oh, I am going to beat your ass!”

“Hey, hey—” Stan shoved himself in between and pushed them both off each other. “Just shut up, alright?” He looked at them both. “Alright? Can you just shut up?”

Kyle stalked off to the front desk, Stan wearily sat down in a chair, and Cartman left to find a vending machine.

He only had five singles on him. Once he ate their worth in candy bars, he walked the halls and stole cash from visitors’ vulnerable purses left alone in rooms with sleeping patients. He hadn’t binge eaten in awhile, but Kenny smoked the rest of his cigarettes and he didn’t want to actually leave the building, it’d been four hours now and the doctors were probably close to a prognosis. Cartman could only think of the Grey’s Anatomy episodes Liane used to watch, and shoved four more quarters into the vending machine.

Half the Three Musketeers bar was already gone when Cartman heard something, and he rounded the corner. It was Stan’s voice, calling his name.

“Eric, you—Jesus, look at you,” Stan said, coming to a halt in front of him. “What the hell is happening?”

“You don’t get it,” Cartman barked. “You just—you don’t—” The big punchline was the joke of their hidden relationship, and Cartman wasn’t going to break that pact without Kenny’s approval.

Stan held his shoulder. “Kenny’s okay, dude.”

Cartman dropped the Three Musketeers. “What?”

“Kenny’s in a coma, but he’s okay, I mean, we haven’t seen him yet, but I guess they didn’t need to graft any skin—you were really quick about it, dude, it could’ve been way worse—”

Cartman pushed Stan aside, sick of his bullshit rambling, and ran back to the CCU entrance where Kyle was talking to a doctor. “What is it? What’s going on?”

The doctor shrugged Cartman’s hand off his arm and cleared his throat. “You can see him now, but...”

Cartman stopped listening at those words and barged into Kenny’s room. He looked like a doll, but not a cool horror movie one that moved of its own volition like when they had sex. He looked porcelain, dead on that hospital bed, a cannula feeding oxygen while machines tracked his breath rate and heartbeat. He wore a gown and the blanket was pulled up to his shoulders, but the skin Cartman could see was neon pink, inflamed, and weeping pus. His eyes were closed, and those too were wounded, missing clumps of eyelashes.

Cartman sank into the chair at Kenny’s bedside. He held Kenny’s small elf hand and dropped his head. “I love you too,” he said to nobody.

Kyle and Stan came running in, followed tersely by the doctor. “He’s in a coma,” the doctor said. “All he needs now is time. More time.”

“How much time?” Kyle asked, coming next to Kenny as well. His eyes widened at Cartman holding Kenny’s hand, but he said nothing and looked back to the doctor.

“Only time will tell,” the doc said.

“Okay, but, how much time do you need to tell the time?” Stan asked.

Cartman couldn’t take it. He’d heard all this before. “I’ve heard this all before,” he said, and stood to leave.

“No you don’t,” Kyle shrieked. His phone rang with a text message. “Karen’s on her way, Cartman, you are not leaving!”

“I’m leaving,” he said, and left to sit in his red two-door sedan, with the drycleaning hanging up behind him.

Johnny Cash sang a different song now. Cartman kept crying.

‘Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, and yo-u're the one I need. So when this day was ended I was still not satisfied, for I knew everything I touched would wither and would die!’

“Aw, shut up,” Cartman yelled through his tears, and ejected the greatest hits CD.

He stared at the baggie from the glovebox, picking it up off his lap. Inside sat a piece of Kenny’s charred skin that stuck on Cartman’s shirt. He noticed it once he’d been given the clear by the nurses, and carefully pocketed it until he could leave, pick up his car and the drycleaning, and keep the piece of Kenny in a safe place.

Cartman thought about ashes and chocolate milk. He opened the baggie and was chewing Kenny’s skin, swallowing it before he could think twice, digesting it before he swung the passenger door open and stuck his fingers down his throat. It was too late, too late. Puking wouldn’t do anything. All he gagged was saliva.

“Are you sick?”

Cartman looked up, saw Kyle staring at him in his usual pose of judgment: arms crossed, eyebrows raised, mouth twisted in a scornful scowl. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt now instead of the suit from Mrs. McCormick’s funeral—how long had it been since then? Six hours? Eight?

The t-shirt belonged to Stan. It was Stan’s shirt Kyle wore. What’d they been up to, getting up in such a hurry they were wearing each others’ clothes? Cartman and Kenny knew they weren’t the only ones with a secret—they could just actually keep the secret a secret, because their relationship phased through their own brand of normality. Kenny had been wearing Cartman’s clothes for years, for example, always three or four years secondhand because Cartman was so much bigger than him and liked to joke he wore kids’ clothes in high school. Nobody bat an eye if Kenny wore Cartman’s old shirts, and nobody bat an eye when Kenny slobbered all over him and Cartman slapped him away, because that’s what he did anyway. Stan and Kyle, on the other hand, were so far up each others’ asses they turned themselves inside out and exposed for the world to see.

Cartman had his head between his knees half-outside the car, his feet planted on the asphalt, ass in the seat.

“I brought coffee,” Kyle said, offering him one of two styrofoam cups.

Cartman lifted his head, finally recognizing the aroma. The coffee burnt the bile out of his throat. “Thanks.”

He set the coffee in a cupholder behind him, turned back and met a fist in his face.

Kyle’s fist wailed down on him again. Cartman slumped over the middle console, watching so the coffee wouldn’t spill, and just let it happen. Two, three more jabs at the temple, upper lip, and jaw.

“I deserved that,” Cartman said once Kyle leaned back and shook his hand out. Cartman sat up and touched his bleeding lip. “Crazy jew.”

“You’re going to fix this, right?” Kyle asked, eying Cartman closely. He must’ve felt pretty serious, not jumping on Cartman’s admission of guilt. “I don’t know how, but you’re fixing it, okay?”

“I’m working on it,” Cartman said, and shut himself back in the car. “Just leave me alone.”

He peeled out the hospital parking lot and went right back home. Back upstairs to the bedroom where he and Kenny fucked just a few hours before. The sheets still smelled like Kenny, a fading proof of his existence. Cartman wanted to cry some more, or jerk off with his nose smashed into Kenny’s cum stain, but instead he just fell into disturbed sleep and dreamt of Kenny’s burning body.

Cartman woke with Kenny’s voice in his head, saying his name and calling him an idiot even in his own imagination.

“Eric! Hey, dip-shit!”

He sat up with a jolt, like being hit by lighting, and had to reorient himself on the bed, expecting Kenny’s languid body against his.

“What the hell do you want?” Cartman asked the empty air beside him. His snarl fell to an empty expression when he realized he was talking to himself. “Oh my god—I killed Kenny,” he said, “I am a bastard.”

“Would you listen to me?”

“What?”

“Would you shut up and lemme talk a second?”

“What!”

Cartman grabbed his face. He was losing his mind in less than twenty-four hours.

“Cartman. Eric.” His mouth moved without his control, like he was reciting a backwards roll call. “It’s happening again.”

“Kenny?” Cartman asked. His voice was pathetically reedy. “What’s going on? Is that you?”

“Can we watch Da Derp Dee Derp Da Teetley Derpee Derpee Dumb?”

“Oh my shit,” Cartman said. He started laughing—frantic, high-pitched squeals of air. “It fucking worked!”

“I’ve always wanted to take this for a spin,” came a sigh, and his hand moved under the band of his shorts.

“Wait!” Cartman snatched his hands to his chest. “Are you dead?”

“Half-dead? I don’t know, man, it’s giving me a headache.”

Cartman winced at the pain lancing his temples. “No, you’re giving me a headache!”

“Aw, sorry, c’mere.” Cartman rubbed his skull in soothing, circular motions. “I wish I could like, kiss you.”

He curled into a fetal position: knees to his chest, arms wrapped around his shins, hands laced together. Hugging himself.

“I could always rub one out for ya.”

“Kenny!” Cartman couldn’t help feeling himself getting hard and wet. “Stop giving me a boner!”

“I can’t help it. You’re making me hard. This is my first time with a vagina. I feel like I’m drooling out a second, better asshole.”

“You’re such a bitch!”

“I’m fulfilling a lot of fantasies over here. If you gotta try my cock, I’d let ya hit it with a hammer if you wanted.”

“I don’t need your penis—mine is just fine—stop invading my dick!”

He pushed Kenny away in his rage, then felt a grappling sensation around his every neural pathway.

“Don’t do that again!”

“Augh!” Cartman’s heart thudded wildly in his chest. “Alright, shit, okay. Are you even anywhere? Or just in my head?”

“It’s kinda an outta body experience. I see hospital me out one eye and you out the other. I look gnarly. Karen’s here, man, shit.”

“Alright, uh, just keep talking to me.”

“Are you emergency dispatch, Eric? They’re like—I’m in a vegetative state, my ass!”

“I’m only hearing your half of things,” Cartman reminded him.

“They’re saying I’m brain-dead. On life support. I’m right here!”

“Stop yelling, damn it.”

Cartman sat up, nursing his head with one hand as he tried not to veer off kilter onto the floor. He felt constrained in his body, almost like there was another person fighting for room—because there was! When he walked into the bathroom and hit the light, Kenny hissed and shut his eyes, but Cartman forced them open again and peered into the mirror.

One iris was brown, the other blue.

“Me out one eye, you out the other,” he repeated.

He shouted and looked down at himself palming his own crotch.

“I said stop giving me boners—”

“Look in the mirror.”

Cartman tore his head up as if by the force of an invisible hand. Kenny’s blue eye stared back, like he was watching him from the inside out.

“Keep lookin at me,” he panted, staring at the foreign blue eye, while his hands pinched his dick and fingered between the warm slit beneath.

“Awww, fuck yes...”

“Cut it out!” Cartman pulled his hands out his pants and fumbled against the sink, eventually dropping to his knees on the plush bath rub. He sat on the floor with his head in his hands. “...Kenny?”

“I’m thinking,” came the reply from Cartman’s own mouth. Cartman could feel it too, a pocket of his own brain whirring a mile a minute.

“Warn me when you go all silent, then,” Cartman huffed. He spread his legs out against the tile, facing the sex cubicle shower. “What are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know, this was your idea. What did you do?”

“I—” Cartman shut his eyes. “I fucking ate a piece of your skin. I mean, same as drinking your ashes, right?”

“You remember that?”

“Kind of. It’s fuzzy, like. Did it really happen?”

“You have no clue,” Kenny said in Cartman’s body.

Cartman frowned, opening his eyes again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He heaved a great sigh. “I don’t know how to even tell you.”

Cartman thumped his head back against the cabinets behind him. “What’re the doctors saying now?”

“They left...Karen’s here...she fell asleep after calling Kevin.”

“Kenny, we need to figure something out, before they pull the plug on ya.”

“Do you remember what happened last time?”

Cartman shook his head. It was all a mismatched blur, half-memories supplemented by random conjectures. “No, not really. I remember your boner for Rob Schneider. I remember Chef’s fucking crazy family. I remember—I gave birth to your soul—or something—don’t tell me I have to do that again—”

“That’s not the point! Cartman, I have to show you something.”

“Show me something?”

Cartman’s legs moved without his permission. Out of the bathroom, into the bedroom. He sat on his bed and grabbed the sheets, held Kenny’s cum stain to his nose.

“What are you doing, you sick fuck?”

“It’s comforting,” Cartman said, laying back against the pillows. “What do you need to show me in my own room?”

“Not your room—up here.” Cartman let go of the sheets to tap his temple. “And stop smelling that, it’s creeping me out.”

“Your cryptic bullshit is creeping me out,” he retorted.

“Let me try something...”

Cartman closed his eyes again. It was nicer this way, he realized. He could feel Kenny on the edges of his consciousness, and without having to see his own body there was no cognitive dissonance to throw him in a tailspin.

“It’s not pretty,” Kenny was warning him.

“You aren’t a real looker yourself, McCormick, so just get on with it.”

“Okay—”

Cartman clutched at his head, curling into the pillows as if to get away from the hundreds of visions suddenly slamming into his brain. Visions of gore and blood and death—impalement, car crashes, suicide—he started hyperventilating, slapping his different body parts to make sure they weren’t dismembered or crushed—because it sure as hell felt like his entire body was crumbling away from him a thousand times over—until he realized he wasn’t experiencing anything—he was remembering—he was Kenny, in Kenny’s scrawny body, reliving Kenny’s memories of death. Decades worth of real physical death, over and over.

“Je-sus—!”

Cartman rolled off the bed gasping for air. His hands were shaking, hair disheveled, and he realized the wetness on his face was tears. “Why didn’t you tell me, Kenny? Why didn’t you say anything—this whole time—this whole time...?”

“You wouldn’t believe me. Nobody did. Nobody remembered but me.”

“But we—this all really happened before, didn’t it? How could I forget?”

“Eric, that’s not the problem.”

Cartman paused, staring at the floor.

“I don’t know if I can come back this time—my mom’s dead.”

“So? So! What’s that bitch got to do with it?”

“I’ve had thirty years to think on this. Every time I die I get a new body. How else besides being reborn? Literally? I been torn limb from limb, diced up—I’m not like Deadpool, or something.”

“Ew,” Cartman’s lip curled in disgust, “you mean she never even went through menopause?”

“Yeah. And now she’s dead, and I’m half-dead—I don’t know where I’m going to go, Eric, if they shut me off. I mean, Karen can’t keep me there long, we can’t afford any of this—”

“Ey,” Cartman said, “you think I can afford you dying either? For real?” He stopped to take a deep breath. “What’ll happen, if they do it?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Cartman tugged at his hair in fistfuls.

“We need to do something.”

“I know that, Kenny! I’m thinking.”

Suddenly he got an idea and jogged downstairs.

“What are you doing?”

“Relax,” Cartman said, walking into the kitchen. He grabbed a few trash bags, then threw the sliding door open out to the backyard. It was pitch black, cloudless and starry. The mountain range melded into the night sky beyond his fence. He walked around to the side of the house and picked up the same shovel he used to bury Kitty years ago. The wet post-rain grass squelched under his shoes.

“Where are you going?”

Cartman unlatched the side fence and went to his car. He set the shovel against the passenger side.

“I’m going to buy cigarettes, you took all mine.”

“What’s with the shovel?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. You’ll find out.”

His hands wouldn’t turn the ignition.

“What are you doing, Cartman?”

“God damn it. Let me go, Kenny!”

The engine started. Cartman finally pulled out of the driveway.

“No shit from you,” he said, looking at himself in the rearview mirror as he parked in a gas station lot. “Play it cool.”

Kenny didn’t reply. Cartman walked inside. A bell rang above his head and the cashier looked up from his phone.

“Douchebag,” Craig Tucker greeted.

Cartman nodded. “Whatever. Marlboro reds.”

“Shorts or longs?”

“Surprise me!”

Craig pulled down a pack of yellow American Spirits from the selection above him. “Surprise.”

“No—I don’t have time for this shit, Tucker.”

“Bad night?” Craig grabbed Camel menthol silvers. “How about these?”

“My mother smoked those.”

“Yeah. I heard you set McCormick on fire.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“That’s not what Broflovski’s saying.”

“What’s he saying then?”

“That you set Kenny on fire.” Craig finally scanned a pack of Marlboro reds. “Six fifty.”

“Six fifty!”

Craig shrugged noncommittally. “Taxes.”

Cartman threw down a five, one, and spare change, then stormed out back to his car. He sat in the driver’s seat and smoked with the window rolled down, bleeding off the rage he got every time he had to see Tucker.

For the most part everything was quiet.

“Kenny?” Cartman whispered after awhile.

“Here,” he replied himself, suddenly very tired.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel so good. The doctor’s back. Something’s happening.”

Cartman lit another cigarette. “Wanna smoke? I need to drive.”

“Yeah—yeah...sure.”

One eye out the side window, the other on the road, Cartman smoked with his left hand and drove with his right hand. His body and mind felt split in half, tearing apart to keep Kenny whole when he was already at maximum capacity. If he couldn’t get this right—if they shut off the life support—Cartman didn’t know what would happen.

Minutes later, he pulled up to the hospital and looked at the clock: 11:05 PM. Cartman swallowed and glanced at his other hand. The cigarette was hanging between his fingers, ashed to the filter in a long gray column; he flicked it out the window.

“Update,” Cartman commanded in an attempt to get Kenny to talk. “McCormick!”

“Fuck, Eric...” He was getting out the car when a wave of exhaustion forced him to hold onto the open door.

“Okay, okay!” Cartman scrubbed his face. “What is it?”

“Doc says I’m running outta time.”

“Okay.” Cartman began hoofing it to Hell’s Pass entrance. “Keep talking, Kenny. Keep talking to me.” He dropped his voice under his breath as he entered the automatic doors. “Who’s in your room?”

“Nobody.”

“Okay, good.”

Cartman hustled back up to the critical care unit where Kenny—his body at least—was being held. Before the main doors to the unit he saw Kyle in the waiting room.

Kyle jumped from his seat and cornered Cartman immediately. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Fuck off,” Cartman said. He took Kyle’s shoulders and added, “It’s me! It’s Kenny, look!”

Kyle’s brow furrowed. He grabbed Cartman’s chin and twisted him around to look at his blue eye closer. “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” he breathed.

Cartman shook his head and scowled, stepping back. “I’m about to do something, and you just need to let me do it, alright?”

“How is this taking care of it?” Kyle demanded, a tad hysterical. He kept looking between Cartman’s bicolored eyes. “Kenny, are you in there? You’re letting him do this?

“He’s my only hope, dude. Please.”

“Hear that?” Cartman boasted.

Kyle frowned. He looked down to the elevators and back at the CCU entrance. “Stan took Karen to the cafeteria five minutes ago. What...what do you need me to do?”

Cartman hurried to Kenny’s room, Kyle a step behind. Cartman jerked at the sight of Kenny’s body. “Augh—Jesus—!” He smashed his eyes shut and turned away.

“What is it?” Kyle asked, shutting the door behind them.

“I don’t know,” Cartman gasped. “Kenny, what’s going on?” he begged.

The machines started going nuts. Cartman’s vision blurred and his head throbbed in pain.

He grit his teeth. “Kenny! Kenny—answer me, damn it!”

“Hey!” Kyle’s voice cut across the chaos. Cartman looked at him. He was at Kenny’s bedside, ready for anything. “What do you need me to do?” he repeated.

“We—we need to get him outta here—”

“He’ll die!”

“He’s dying anyway!”

Cartman lunged forward and started tearing out all the tubes and cords emanating from Kenny’s body, then carried him over his shoulders in a fireman’s hold.

Kyle opened the door and ran ahead down the hall, pushing people out of the way. Once they got to the elevators he threw an arm out and nearly clotheslined Cartman’s trachea. A door dinged, opening to reveal Stan and Karen.

“The stairs, the stairs,” Kyle said, shoving Cartman to the heavy access door, “just go, Eric, go!”

Cartman sprinted down all four stories, skipping every last stair. He burst out from a random door and ran across the parking lot to his car.

He forgot about the trash bags—what point was there in hiding the body of your comatose boyfriend—and dropped Kenny in the backseat. Sweating bullets, Cartman stopped to check his faint pulse. “Thank god,” he sighed, climbing in behind the wheel.

He lit another cigarette, screeched back into a wide turn, and sped out the parking lot. Wind funneled in the open windows, blurring the black landscape on either side of the road. At a red light he slammed the Johnny Cash mix CD back in and hit play.

“Kenny?” he was saying again and again. “Kenny, you motherfucker, answer me!”

He began tapping the beat out to the song so he wouldn’t start panicking, pressing down on the pedal as he neared the cemetery.

“It’s okay, Kenny,” he said. “It’ll be okay, Kenny.”

Cartman tore down the narrow cemetery lanes, kicking up clouds of gravel as he went. The brakes screamed an abrupt halt in front of the two McCormick lots, and Johnny Cash went into his final refrain: ‘I keep a close watch on this heart of mine, I keep my eyes wide open all the time, I keep the ends out for the tie that binds—because you're mine, I walk the line...’

Cartman dragged Kenny’s body out and started digging into the soft, freshly turned earth.

“Almost there, Kenny,” he said, “almost there,” and kept digging at a frantic pace. He dropped to his hands and knees when he struck something solid, pushed the remaining layer of dirt away to open the casket beneath.

Even in just a few hours the corpse of Kenny’s mother had enough time to stink. Cartman stood, scrabbled over the edge of the hole he’d dug, and ran back to the car for the switchblade he kept in the middle console.

“Kenny, I’m right here, Kenny,” he said, jumping back down into the casket. He flicked the blade out and stabbed into Mrs. McCormick’s abdomen without hesitation, drawing a generous gorge which he cut further into a flap and pulled back. Embalming fluid seeped out from the square. Cartman dug his hands inside the opening and felt around for—something—

His hands closed around a solid, curled form. “Oh, god,” he moaned, pulling out an embryonic thing from the corpse. He cradled it to his chest, looking down to see it miraculously twitch, and laughed. “Kenny, you fucking unbelievable son of a bitch.”

Cartman gently deposited the unborn infant in the grass next to Kenny’s scarred, adult body, which was quickly turning gray and lifeless.

He froze before the two forms, sitting in the rain-wet grass on his knees, up to his elbows in embalming fluid, and looked up at the stars.

“Tell me what I gotta do,” he implored. “I don’t—I don’t want to do it wrong, I can’t, Kenny, I can’t—”

One of Kenny’s hand twitched. Cartman forewent the burns and pus and bandages and clutched it in both of his.

“Oh, Kenny, oh Kenny...”

Tears streaming down his face and sobs wracking his shoulders, Cartman curled over Kenny and dropped his forehead to the cold one beneath him.

A loud wailing cry pierced his ear. Cartman jerked upward and looked at the baby on his other side.

“Sacrifice,” he suddenly remembered, and wiped his eyes. “Okay. Okay, Kenny, okay.”

Cartman clutched the switchblade in both his sweaty hands and stabbed Kenny’s adult body in the heart. He let go of the blade immediately. Kenny’s chest seized as blood spurted around the intrusion, and then he lay still.

Cartman fell back and gathered the crying baby to his chest. At the same time a great knot of pain whirled around his solar plexus. He cried out as Kenny’s barely-there spirit was expelled. A great orange light hovered in front of his eyes a moment before plunging into the infant against his chest.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> couldnt sleep until I finished this, have some celebratory sex
> 
> songs referenced: 
> 
> Someone To Watch Over Me - Willie Nelson
> 
> I Walk The Line - Johnny Cash 
> 
> Flesh and Blood - Johnny Cash

When Kenny rose back to consciousness he found himself all folded up, limbs bent and sore, tucked into each other. He opened his eyes against warm fabric, tried to lift his head, and was immediately clutched tight.

“Kenny...,” somebody mumbled. “Kenny? Kenny!”

Kenny pushed the arm around his neck loose and sat up, stealing a deep gulp of air. Then his back hit the ground as he was tackled in a bear hug and started suffocating all over again.

“Offa me!” he choked. “Get—off—!”

Cartman lifted himself up on his arms but didn’t move his fat ass off Kenny’s hips. He was staring like Kenny grew a new head, hands bracketing either side of Kenny’s ears.

Kenny craned his neck to look around, noticed a baby bottle half-full of milk rolled under the bed, glanced down at himself and he was naked.

He looked back up and saw Cartman’s eyes and suddenly understood. “How long has it been?” he asked quietly.

It took Cartman a second to speak. Kenny watched his throat bob, traced the line of his gulp. “I don’t know.” Cartman squinted at the window. The blinds were drawn, gaps casting purple bars across his face. He turned his eyes back down to Kenny. “Sun’s coming up.”

Kenny lifted his hands to his face. He flexed his fingers, observed each bony knuckle, then ran his palms over his chest, clavicle, nipples, scratched his bellybutton, and checked his dick and balls. His skin was smooth, unblemished, fresh as a baby and hairy as a thirty year old man.

“Dying make you horny?” Cartman asked. “How about life? Life make you horny?”

“Life’s the horniest thing ever,” Kenny said, and surged up to kiss him.

Cartman locked his elbows so they wouldn’t break each others’ noses while Kenny laced his hands around Cartman’s neck, and they still kept kissing, sucking tongues, counting teeth.

Kenny dropped his head back down on the carpet when he got dizzy. Cartman’s mouth was red and bitten, and he hoped his looked the same.

Cartman thumbed his lower lip. “You’ll re-pierce this?”

“New body, I said, didn’t I?” Cartman didn’t move his thumb as Kenny talked. Kenny liked the taste of it against the tip of his tongue. “You want me to?”

“I liked it.” Cartman pushed his finger against the bed of Kenny’s tongue. “Why don’t you pierce this too. Eat me out.”

Kenny circled his mouth over Cartman’s thumb, popped off with a kiss against the fingernail. “Whatever you want, baby.”

“Baby. Don’t call me baby. You’re the baby,” Cartman said. His voice dropped, face darkened. “I nursed you back to life, dude.”

“Wish you could breastfeed me.”

“Sorry I didn’t predict this situation and wait chopping off my tits.”

“Is that what the bottle’s for?” Kenny asked him.

Cartman groaned and flipped himself over so they were laying side-by-side on their backs. “Yes.”

Kenny stilled in the quiet, listening to Cartman breathe, feeling the bars of purple sunlight against his legs.

“What happened when you stopped talking?” Cartman’s voice was an anxious whisper.

“I was running out of time,” Kenny said. “If you weren’t biding time, I would’ve been gone way before then, honestly.”

“Will anybody remember?”

“Probably not,” Kenny shrugged. “Will you?”

Cartman sat up against the side of the bed, pulled Kenny with him. “Look at me.”

Kenny did and sighed close-mouthed, nostrils flaring. He gently passed a finger under Cartman’s still-blue eye. “Jesus, Eric...”

“I’ll remember,” Cartman vowed.

Kenny leaned against his chest. Cartman’s arms circled around him automatically and Kenny imagined being held all night long, growing from a baby to a boy to a man.

It could have been an hour until Kenny untangled himself. He stood and cracked his neck and joints. Cartman watched him with vague amusement from the floor.

“What?” Kenny asked, a smile on his face.

“I missed seeing your crazy ass,” Cartman admitted. “Why don’t you put on some clothes.”

Kenny sauntered over to the dresser and bent down to pick sweats from the bottom drawer. He found a pair of green South Park Cows pants and forewent a shirt. He liked having a physical body again, wanted to feel the air free against his nipples.

“I haven’t worn those pants since middle school,” said Cartman. He stood up with a groan. “We’re fucking old.”

“Feel like I was born yesterday,” Kenny said.

“Shut up.” Cartman fell back on the bed. “I’m so goddamn sore. I was running around digging graves all sorts of shit for your ass. I took stairs, four whole flights of em.”

“Big strong man,” Kenny intoned. “Big man take stairs, save princess.”

“Would you get over here already?”

Kenny jumped onto the bed. Cartman chuffed, wind knocked out of him. They slept until noon, ate sandwiches and Cheesy Poofs for lunch, then went back to bed and stared at each other for half an hour.

“What now?” Cartman asked.

“Well.” Kenny turned his back flat against the headboard and picked his nose. “I think that was my last second chance, you know?”

“Don’t get your boogers on the bed—no more dying?”

“No more,” Kenny affirmed, smearing his booger on Cartman’s knee. “Which sucks, I   
got no risk analysis.”

“Big man keep you alive.”

“Haha.” Kenny bumped Cartman’s shoulder. “Big man should fuck me with his big dick.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m technically a virgin. New tight asshole. Open for business.”

“No, it’s not,” Cartman said, moving a leg against Kenny’s crotch as he slid over on top of him.

Kenny hummed, tugging Cartman closer. Their arms slid around each other as they met in another kiss. Cartman bit down hard on Kenny’s bottom lip, like he was trying to pierce it again for him. Kenny moaned into the blossom of pain; it felt good to be alive.

“Knees,” Cartman muttered, manhandling Kenny around onto all fours, tugging his sweats down at the same time.

Kenny finally paid attention to what Cartman was wearing, just a t-shirt and boxers. “You look hot,” he said over his shoulder.

Cartman’s palm clamped down on the crown of his head, and his nose was forced around down into the pillows. “Stop talking.”

“‘Why aren’t you talking,’ ‘stop talking,’” Kenny mimicked into the bed sheets.

Cartman had a hand on Kenny’s lower back now, working his cock to hardness with the other hand. Kenny shut up once he slid inside, no fingers, his thumbs pressed against Kenny’s last vertebrae in a bruising grip.

Cartman never understood how Kenny liked it this way, as if he was getting a big favor, probably because he couldn’t understand how Kenny got off on how he got off. One easy little squeeze and Cartman was plastered against Kenny’s back, rutting into him like a dog with a red rocket. Granted, he couldn’t go too deep, and for this reason Kenny rolled his ass back against Cartman’s hips to meet in the middle. He could feel Cartman’s wet slick percolating down to his ball sac, was always amazed at how much Cartman could produce. He meant it when he said it felt like drooling, last night, and it was hot as hell. Cartman could come about twenty times in a row and still pump into Kenny for hours, lubricating them both up till the sheets were soaking underneath.

The bed frame creaked in tandem with their joint movements. Kenny was too busy clutching at the headboard to touch his dick and whimpered his thanks when Cartman began jerking him off. It was only a matter of time after that—and they both knew you’d never have as much time as you’d like.

Kenny came over Cartman’s fist and collapsed back down into the mattress. He assumed that was the end of it, until Cartman started rolling him over.

“What is it?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Shh, princess.”

Cartman got up on his knees and put a steady hand behind him. Kenny’s hips jerked when Cartman grabbed his softening dick and forced it into an upward position, chasing off any residual lethargy. He shuffled further up the headboard once more and grabbed Cartman’s ass to help position him.

Cartman sank down onto him in one fluid, practiced drop of the hips. His eyelids fluttered shut. He sat there a few moments, and Kenny let him, tracing random patterns in his chest.

“Look at me,” Kenny said.

Cartman opened his eyes slow. Kenny felt his thigh muscles tense as he rose up, and when his brown-blue eyes met Kenny’s he wordlessly glided down again. The process repeated with explicit eye contact and soft, wet sounds between their legs.

“Thought I was never gonna get this dick again,” Cartman said.

“I’m thinking I died and went to heaven.”

Cartman swirled his hips. “Nahhh... Don’t make pussy like mine in heaven.” He squeezed tight just to prove it.

“Eric,” Kenny hissed, hands flying to Cartman’s sides to hold him still.

“What,” Cartman goaded, easily continuing his ministrations despite Kenny’s grip.

“This ain’t gonna last too long.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna—I’m gonna—”

“Relax,” Cartman said, framing Kenny’s jaw. He leaned in and kissed him open-eyed, brown and blue. “Cum in me,” he panted into Kenny’s mouth.

Kenny didn’t need anymore permission than that. His hips snapped up so fast he thought he’d break his pelvic bone. He didn’t cum that much but the aftershocks sent tremors through every inch of his body.

As per procedure, Kenny forced Cartman onto his back afterward. Kenny nosed between his thighs, pulled him closer to delve in with his tongue. He lapped at Cartman’s g-spot, tasting his own cum with Cartman’s sweet nectar, imagined how much better he could strike that soft puffy bullseye with a goddamn tongue piercing like Cartman suggested.

Kenny pulled off a second to breathe, resting his temple against the inside of Cartman’s thigh.

Cartman’s hands found their way into his hair. “C’mere, hey, that’s enough.”

“Huh?” Kenny was bullied up onto Cartman’s front by the roots of his hair. “That hurts,” he complained.

“You’re crying,” Cartman said.

“Am I?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Uh. I don’t know.” Kenny tucked his face into Cartman’s chest. “Just—relieved, I guess.” He liked hearing the steady thump of Cartman’s heartbeat against his ear, let his own follow pace. “I’m tired.”

“Still?”

He shrugged. “Growing a new body takes a lot outta me.”

“Go to bed then.”

“Good idea,” Kenny murmured, and began rolling off Cartman to do that; except Cartman held him in place. He propped his chin on Cartman’s sternum and asked, softly, “What, Eric?”

“Princess, just let me look at ya,” Cartman said.

Kenny smiled and snuggled in to sleep some more, cushioned by Cartman’s big, safe body. “Look all you want. I’m not goin anywhere.”

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write about nothing, until it got weird. 
> 
> Dedicated to the divine fool, who is the best kenny/cartman writer.
> 
> cartman is ftm if you didn't get it


End file.
